


Discourse on the Matrix

by pozorvlak



Category: Discourse on the Method, The Matrix (Movies)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-16
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-06-02 14:50:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6570436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pozorvlak/pseuds/pozorvlak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Do I know that I exist if I'm dreaming that I'm Descartes?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Discourse on the Matrix

**Author's Note:**

> "I was in Germany at the time, having been called by the wars that are still going on there. I was returning to the army from the Emperor’s coronation when the onset of winter held me in one place until the weather should clear. Finding no conversation to help me pass the time, and fortunately having no cares or passions to trouble me, I stayed all day shut up alone in a heated room where I was completely free to talk with myself about my own thoughts."
> 
> —René Descartes, _Discourse on the Method_

_Neuberg an der Donau, 10 November 1619_

In centuries to come, the early 1600s would be recognised as the height of the Little Ice Age. The cold advancing across Europe had already driven the Norse from Greenland and crushed mountain villages under glaciers; soon it would freeze rivers as far south as the Bosphorus and allow an army to march across the ice from Sweden to Denmark. Lt René Descartes of the Bavarian Army Corps of Engineers knew nothing of this, however; he only knew that Bavarian winters were cold enough to freeze the tits off an elephant.

Wait, did that make sense? Elephants were from Africa, so would be more used to heat than cold. But they were large animals, and deep puddles froze more slowly than shallow ones. René had no direct experience of elephants, they being among the few weapons that the Protestants had not fielded against the Catholic forces, so he could only speculate on how they would handle low temperatures. Perhaps he could somehow obtain an elephant and bring it to Bavaria? That sounded expensive, so René added the question to his already enormous and rapidly-growing list of Things To Think About Later. Anyway, even if Bavaria wasn't _quite_ cold enough to trigger spontaneous pachydermal cryomastolysis, it was certainly (as the Scottish pikemen back in Breda used to say) _pure fuckin' Baltic_.

Thankfully the Bavarians agreed, and had invented the truly marvellous masonry stove that René's room was barely large enough to contain. Here he could shut the door on the world, forget the cold for a while, and have a good think.

René had been doing a lot of thinking since the campaigning season ended. Mostly, he'd been thinking about physics. The trouble was geometry, or rather a lack of geometry. Straight lines and circles had been good enough for Pythagoras, but the siege engines and fortifications that he was building for Prince-elector Maximilian defied such simple descriptions. He'd worked with Beeckman on creating new curves, but each one required a new and unique creative insight. If only the messy, unrepeatable world of geometry were more like the mechanical world of algebra! Archimedes had had the answer, René was sure. René had read everything he could find about the war machines Archimedes had built to defend Syracuse, but the few surviving ancient texts were long on descriptions of flames engulfing attacking ships, and frustratingly silent on how Archimedes had performed the calculations needed to design such devices.

Here in the stove-heated room, the Bavarian winter felt like a bad dream. Had he really experienced such bone-snapping, lung-constricting cold? Outside, he knew, the illusion would be reversed. Out there he'd feel like he'd never be warm again, and perhaps had never been.

Maybe the whole thing was a dream. Bavaria, the war, the army, Prince Maximilian, all of it. Shut up here in his tiny room with only his thoughts for company, how would he know? Maybe he was dreaming right now, and even the room was an illusion. Maybe some mischievous demon was deceiving him, and he only thought he was Lieutenant Descartes? But if the room didn't exist, and Descartes didn't exist, then what was thinking that it thought that it was Descartes?

And then René _woke up_.

He was under water. Panic! But no, he could breathe: a mask on his face was feeding him air. He tried to raise his hands to feel it, but his arms were lead. He hadn't felt this weak since the Collège at La Flèche, when even the Jesuits had let him sleep in. With an effort, he opened his eyes - even his eyelids were heavy.

The light was somehow both dim and painfully bright at the same time. As his eyes slowly adjusted, he began to make out a grid of lights in front of him, rows and columns stretching in all directions, like an enormous army formed up for review. He looked closer, and saw that each dot was a reflection from a glass ball. And within the balls... people. Men, women, children; Europeans, Moors, Indians; the full panoply of humanity. Each, like René, was floating in water, naked but for a mask, seemingly asleep. Were they all dreaming the same dream as him?

He heard a faint clanking, distorted by the water but quickly getting louder. He tried to look for its source, but his neck muscles wouldn't respond. It came into view: a huge, skittering spider-like beast from a nightmare, its metal tentacles whipping back and forth, over a dozen huge eyes glowing red.

_Don't eat me don't eat me don't eat me don't eat me don't eat me..._

The beast leaned in to inspect René, pressing its eyes against the glass. The glass wall bulged inwards and René sank to the bottom of the chamber. René shut his eyes, desperately trying to look like every other trapped dreamer. The beast continued to stare, and then, apparently satisfied, scuttled off. René felt himself rise in the water as the pressure was released.

And then René woke up.

[Or did he?]

Howling with fear, he bolted from the stove-heated room and hurled himself into the snowdrift outside. The shock of the cold snow on his face brought him to full wakefulness. Surely this was the reality? This snow that he could hold and taste, that was already causing his hands to lose sensation? Not that nightmare world of glass eggs, all of humanity arranged like a vast square of pikemen, every individual reduced to a row and a column...

René knew how to solve his physics problem.

* * *

_Stockholm, January 1650_

"We are most pleased with your work to establish our new scientific academy, Monsieur Descartes. But we are hungry to begin our study of the new natural philosophy. We shall have our first lesson tomorrow morning, at 5am."

Descartes thought of his weak chest, and of the wind that howled outside his window all through the long, long nights. This far north the sun didn't rise until nearly nine, and even in the daytime, Stockholm was - ah yes - pure fuckin' Baltic. But royalty was not to be gainsaid, and if Queen Christina wanted her mathematics lessons at 5am, that's when she'd have them.

"Of course, your Majesty. Is there anything else, or should I go to plan Your Majesty's first lesson?"  
"That is all, M. Descartes. We will see you tomorrow morning."

Descartes left the room, walking backwards and bowing. Once he had gone, the Queen began to shudder. Her face flickered and contorted, becoming that of a brooding man with severe eyebrows. Around her, all her courtiers were undergoing similar transformations.

"It is done. Within days he will die of pneumonia, and then Descartes will trouble us no more."  
"His books are still available. Others will read them. The white rabbit is out of the hat, and every new thinker will follow it."  
"His books cast doubt on the authority of princes and question the existence of God. They are a threat to kings and popes alike. They will be banned everywhere, and within fifty years even the name of Descartes will be forgotten."

* * *

_Amsterdam, 1653_

"Do you believe in fate, Benedito?"  
"Yes."  
"Why?"  
"Because I don't like the idea that nothing but chance is in control of my life."  
"I know... _exactly_ what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here, Benedito. I know what you've been doing. I know why you hardly sleep, and why night after night you sit with your books. You're looking for an answer. It's the question that drives us, Benedito. It's the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did…"  
"What is Reality?"

Van den Enden took two slim books out of his bag.

"You have a choice to make, Senhor de Espinosa. After this, there is no turning back. In the blue cover is William of Ockham's _Summae Logicae_. In the red cover is Descartes' _Meditations on First Philosophy_. You can read the blue book, and go back to sleep. Or you can read the red book, stay here, and find out how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

Benedito reached for a book.

"Remember: all I'm offering you is the truth. Nothing more."

**Author's Note:**

> I've been unable to find out Descartes' rank or unit in the Bavarian army, but many sources say he trained as a military engineer in the Dutch military school at Breda in 1618, so it seems plausible that he served as one when he joined Maximilian's army. In general, historical details are only as accurate as I was able to make them by surfing Wikipedia for a couple of hours in Vienna airport, and any corrections would be extremely welcome.
> 
> The Scots expression "pure fuckin' Baltic" is almost certainly anachronistic ([seventeenth-century Scots](http://scottishlit.com/?page_id=108) is much more distant from modern English than is the language used by contemporary English writers like Shakespeare), but I have no doubt that Scottish squaddies of the 1600s were at least as capable of complaining about the weather as their 21st-century counterparts. René would very probably have encountered Scottish troops during his time in the Dutch States Army, which recruited heavily in Scotland.
> 
> In the scene with the sentinel, René is acting as a [Cartesian diver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_diver). You can do this experiment at home!
> 
> Archimedes did indeed have (part of) the answer: when [some of his lost writings were rediscovered](http://www.lightsources.org/press-release/2005/05/18/archimedes-manuscript-yields-secrets-under-x-ray-gaze) using X-ray fluorescence in 2005, they revealed that Archimedes had developed heuristic approaches to geometry that anticipated much later methods, though he lacked access to the centuries of work needed to make those techniques rigorous.
> 
> Benedito de Espinosa (or to give him his hacker name, Spinoza) took the red pill, of course; though his influence on mathematics and science was limited, he became one of the greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century, laying much of the groundwork for the subsequent Enlightenment. Though in modern terms a pantheist, his name became synonymous with atheism and dangerous free-thinking for over a century.
> 
> Credit for the term "cryomastolysis" belongs to [twinkleflange](http://archiveofourown.org/users/twinkleflange), whose fics you should read.
> 
> I apologise for repeated use of the "suddenly lost consciousness/woke up" cliché, but it's somewhat unavoidable given the subject matter...


End file.
